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Category:
Hearthstone

Weekly Hearthstone Roundup #5 (Jan 6 – Jan 12)

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radek
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Published: Jan 13, 2017 06:44 pm

This article is over 7 years old and may contain outdated information

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Introduction

Weekly Hearthstone Roundup is a series summarizing last week in Hearthstone. By making a compilation of the news regarding game, teams, pro players, ladder, community etc. we try to make catching up easier for those of you who don’t follow the HS news every day.

If you feel that we’ve missed something important or that we didn’t properly cite the source, let us know in the comments and we’ll fix it right away.

P.S. This week was really FULL of news, so it’s very likely that I did actually miss something, sorry if that’s the case 🙁

General/Game News

  • Location of the HCT Winter Championship has been announced – Even with be held in the Melia Nassau Beach All-Inclusive, Bahamas! It’s a great extra motivation to go for the high ladder and tournament finishes to get more points.
  • Blizzard devs will be holding a live Q&A Stream on Twitch on January 13th (today) – Stream will start at 9 am PST, or 6 pm CET. Questions will be answered by Game Director Ben Brode and Game Designer Dean Alaya. Stream wil be hosted on the official Hearthstone Twitch channel. If you won’t be able to watch it live, don’t worry, I’ll do a summary, which should be released later today or early tomorrow!
  • December 2016 ranked season final rankings were released. Check out the top 200 players from two western regions: Europe, Americas
  • Ben Brode has shared some insight about the Basic Decks – Basically, Basic Decks accomplish what they’re supposed to. They’re weak to show that the new opened cards are stronger, so the players can feel sense of progress. They also teach that players should make swaps in their decks, they teach basics of deck building – like player might notice that Magma Rager is a bad card and add Frostbolt instead. Since new players are matched with other new players, there is no reason to give them strong decks right away – let them learn the power curve from the bottom, since they play against other weak decks anyway. Ben Brode notes that there is still a lot of room for improvement, but overall he seems happy with the current Basic decks.
  • HearthHead: Brode Discusses Keeping Hearthstone Fresh As Standard Rotation Nears – Brode talks about multiple things like Basic & Classic sets continuing to be “evergreen”, but possibly with some changes – Blizzard might rotate out some problematic cards to Wild instead of nerfing them. They try to look at the meta years ahead, not only what will happen in 2017. Ben Brode also clearly said that Reno Jackson (so probably other cards too, for that matter) won’t stay in Standard – they want to add different, unique options to keep this play style instead of keeping the same cards, which would result in the same meta decks over and over again.
  • IGN: Mike Donais interview part 1: The many iterations of Small-Time Buccaneer – No changes to the ladder are planned for the start of next Standard year (~3 months from now), the meta has huge variety with multiple decks sitting at a very similar win rate, Shaman don’t seem to be a problem right now (at least not as much as they were last expansion). Mike also talks about how Small-Time Buccaneer was supposed to look throughout the card’s development.
  • IGN: Mike Donais interview part 2: On designing Jade, testing Red Mana and leaving Reno behind – IGN interviews the Hearthstone Senior Designer Mike Donais once again, this time around he talks a lot of about the design behind Gadgetzan, about Reno/Highlander decks (it seems that they don’t play to make more Highlander cards soon, after all) . Mike also talks about some card designs that didn’t get into the game. Interesting read overall, but I’m pretty sad about the Highlander decks.
  • HearthHead: Temporary Accounts Coming To Mobile Hearthstone – Android and iOS users in China have received a new patch that allows them to play the game without logging in. This is great news, because process of creating a Battle.net account might discourage some players before they even try the game. Majority of the playerbase treat Hearthstone as a mobile game, and a long registration in mobile game isn’t really something too common. Now everyone can first try it and then register if they like it. Hopefully the option will come to the West too.
  • This week’s Tavern Brawl is: Cart Crash at the Crossroads – Brawl is a replay, it has already happened two times before. No deck building, you pick one class and after the mulligan phase you get to Discover a second one (1 of the 3 options) – your deck consists of cards from both of the classes chosen randomly.

eSports

Ladder/Decks/Meta

  • ViciousSyndicate: Data Reaper Report #33 was released – No huge changes to the meta this week either, but we see some slight moves. Top 5 meta decks overall are: Aggro Shaman, Pirate Warrior, Dragon Warrior, Dragon Priest and Miracle Rogue. Top 5 decks in Legend are: Aggro Shaman, Pirate Warrior, Control Warrior, Mid-Jade Shaman and Reno Mage. Overall on the ladder, decks didn’t change their win rates much. Biggest shifts were -0,72% to Dragon Priest, -0,78% to Midrange Shaman, with a small raise to Anyfin Paladin (+0,87%) and a HUGE raise to Control Warrior (+1,28%). CW is still Tier 3 on the ladder overall, but it seems to be making comeback. It already did in Legend, biggest shifts this week were: Dragon Priest (-0,71%) and Control Shaman (-2,15%) went down, while two Warrior archetypes – Pirate (+1,10%) and Control (1,62%) has seen a big raise in popularity and performance.
  • MetaStats: Standard Meta Snapshot Week 53 (Jan 1 – Jan 7) was released – The 8 most successful decks, according to MetaStats, are RenoLock (59%), Midrange Shaman (58%), Pirate Warrior (58%), Aggro Shaman (56%), Reno Priest (56%), Dragon Warrior (55%), Reno Mage (55%) and Miracle Rogue (54%).
  • Meta Stats: Wild Meta Snapshot Week 1 (Dec 26 – Jan 8) was released – Standard meta snapshots are very common, but we rarely see ones for the Wild mode. Top 8 most successful Wild decks according to MetaStats are: RenoLock, Secret Paladin, Pirate Warrior, Reno Priest, Secret Hunter, Tempo Mage, Control Warrior and Dragon Priest.
  • SectorOne: Rank 1 Legend Decks – Mean Streets of Gadgetzan January – Steelo’s #1 Legend Reno Mage, Feno’s #1 Legend Questing Miracle Rogue, StanCifka’s #1 Legend RenoLock, Navi00t’s Top 10 Legend Control Warrior
  • HearthstoneTopDecks: Hearthstone Legendaries You Can Safely Disenchant – Shameless promotion of my article.

Tournaments

  • GosuGamers: China crowns Gold Series champion, determines HCT Winter and CN vs. NA line-up – After learning the NA line-up last week, now we know the whole roster for CN vs NA event. NA will be represented by Chakki, Reynad, Fr0zen, Dog and Cydonia, while CN will be represented by OmegaZero, XHope, Lovelychook, Lvge and JasonZhou.
  • WESG Hearthstone 2016 Grand Finals – Group Stage – January 12-13 – The biggest non-Blizzard prize tournament in Hearthstone strikes again. 2016 World Electronic Sports Games Grand Finals will host 4 games with a total prize pool of $3,700,000 USD, of which $300,000 goes to the Hearthstone finals.

    Starting off the tournament is a 2-day group stage, in which 24 players compete in 4 groups of 6 players each. Each group will see three players moving on to the January 14 playoffs, with the best performing player in each group automatically advancing to the quarter-finals. Finally, rounding off the tournament is the third-place decider match and the grand finals taking place on January 15, in which one player will return home with $150,000 and the title of 2016 WESG Champion. Multiple well-known players like Neirea, Orange, Impact or Xixo participate in the event. You can watch the English stream on the starladder_hs_en Twitch channel.

Community/Podcasts/Videos

Closing

If there are any more news from last week we might have missed, let us know in the comments. And, once again, if you have any suggestions for this series (or for the site in general!) we’d really appreciate if you’d let us know.

Good luck on the ladder and until next time!

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radek